You report that the government wants to build houses on another 1500 square miles of land, much of it British countryside.

Yet developers are sitting on many thousands of acres of land already granted planning permission. Tens of thousands of brown-field sites lay undeveloped.

Right now, potential house-buyers are having great difficulties getting mortgages. The banks are sitting on their hands building up reserves. They are now also risk-averse.

According to the Empty Houses website, and based on information available from local authorities, over 700,000 houses in the UK are empty. Almost half have been empty for more than six months.

And who, exactly, are these homes for? The UK?s population may be growing but that is not the whole story. Foreigners, particularly Islamists, are adding new-born children at more than four per woman, whilst the indigenous population is rearing an unsustainable 1.6 children per woman.

Europeans continue to pour into the UK, over four million of them since the EU forced the UK to open its borders. They are free to enter at any time, while migrants from the Commonwealth and the third world have to argue their way in.

Recently you reported that 45,000 Poles had returned to the UK despite our failing economy and higher unemployment. Wages and job prospects in the UK were still better than in Poland.

You also report today that high earners are leaving the UK to escape high tax rates. We may be growing by a net 1000 a day, but that does not fully reflect the damage being inflicted on the British economy.

We may be powerless to stop an accelerating exchange of skills and experience for destitute migrants seeking a better life and the chance to send money back to whence they came. But that is no recipe for economic growth.

Despite all these undeniable facts, our Prime Minister wants to relax planning rules and encourage new houses on green field sites near towns and villages with inadequate infrastructure to cope.

He is enraging his core rural support.

(Not published by the Daily Telegraph)

...on payments to Brussels

We have to hope Cameron?s determination to freeze the EU?s budget for next year is based on a thorough briefing.

Is he aware, for instance, that little of the EU?s annual expenditure of some 100 billion euros is paid in advance? Yet the EU routinely retains many billions in cash on its balance sheet, which is extraordinary since its debtors are the member states ? which do not normally go bust.

The maintenance of such huge cash and near-cash balances suggests the deliberate retention of member states' surpluses, which is against the EU?s own rules. It also displays signs of 'own-state' resources - the hallmark of an emerging independent state.

Such obviously unnecessary and excessive cash surpluses totally undermine the EU?s demanding substantial increases in funding next year or any other.

(Not published by the Daily Telegraph)

...on exporting jobs?

The EU have funded the export of UK car workers? jobs before. In 2006, 105 million euros were given to the Slovak government to encourage Peugeot to expand its car production in Trnava, after which Peugeot closed a plant in the UK.

When challenged (by me and others) the Dutch commissioner Neelie Kroes, who held the competition portfolio, nit-picked. She claimed the company had received the funds from the Slovak government before Slovakia became a member of the EU.

Strangely, she forgot to mention that the EU was pumping millions of euros into Slovakia at the time, to boost public support for membership.

Now the same technique is being used with Turkey.

(Not published by Sunday Times)

?and importing criminality

You were right to warn of the consequences of Romanians and Bulgarians being free to move here in 2014, when many tens of thousands will take up the opportunity.

We will import more than people. Judging from the MEPs and staff from those two countries I encountered in Brussels after 2006, when they arrived as ?observers?, we will be importing trouble as well. Their norms of behaviour and attitudes are not ours. The majority view appears to be that the state is there to be fleeced.

In a nutshell, we cannot have open borders and a viable welfare state. We already know it simply doesn?t work.

(Not published by Sunday Telegraph)

?on the role of MEPs

Anthony Saunders? letter about local MEPs taking no interest in his problems should surprise nobody. The south-east of England region of the EU extends from east Kent to west Hampshire, round London to north Oxfordshire. It takes in over 80 UK constituencies.

Ten MEPs represent the six million people who live in this amorphous area, and all ten could live in the same village. Nirj Deva MEP (Conservative) doesn't even declare an address in the SE region. Neither did Baroness Nicholson (Lib-Dim) and Dr Caroline Lucas (Green) when they were members.

During my time, (2004-09) I was the only MEP who lived and worked west of East Sussex. I tried to make myself available to constituents from the whole region who needed help with problems generated by the EU ? of which there were far too many. As a result of the indifference of most of my fellow MEPs, I was often the MEP of last resort.

Elected representatives they may be, but MEPs have no power to initiate or repeal what passes in the EU for ?legislation?. Nor do they have any real control over the EU budget.

Everything is decided by secret committees of bureaucrats. The European Parliament has rightly been described as just an expensive talking shop full of highly paid monkeys pressing buttons for bananas. Its true role is to provide an illusion of accountable democracy. But it is actually nothing of the sort.

Anyone wanting to know more about the EU might find my memoirs A Mote in Brussels? Eye of interest. It is a full, frank and controversial account of five years fighting the EU from within the castle walls. This first ever blow-by-blow diary of a British MEP will be published as an ebook before Christmas.

(Not published by the Surrey Advertiser)

? and on extradition to the USA

It is a great mystery to people in the UK why your federal government wanted to extradite Gary McKinnon for hacking into US military computers.

Surely he deserved a Congressional Medal for pointing out the weaknesses in the Pentagon?s security systems?